Designing Interactive PDF Forms From Scratch

But suppose you want to create a brand new form from a blank page. And you want it to be an interactive form that users can fill out onscreen. And you want to go on a vacation to a tropical paradise. Well, Foxit PhantomPDF 6 can help you with the first two of these desires.

How To Create Forms From Scratch

You can refer to your PhantomPDF User Manual for full details, of course, but the gist of form creation is simply this.

Create a blank PDF from FILE > Create > Blank.

Open the blank page with Foxit PhantomPDF, and then add form fields.

Add text before or after the form fields by choosing or the Typewriter Tool (see Chapter 7).

Also, PhantomPDF 6 offers a group of tools called Foxit Form Designer that you can use to create interactive forms from the ground up quickly and easily.

Foxit Form Designer Makes Creating Interactive PDF Forms a Snap

With Foxit Form Designer, you can add almost anything you can think of that an interactive form could need, using the following tools:

Push Button creates an interactive form element to initiate predefined actions, such as opening a file, submitting data to a web server, or resetting a form. You can customize this button with images and text.

Radio Button presents a group of choices from which the person completing your form can select only one.

Check Box presents yes-or-no choices for individual items. If the form contains multiple check boxes, form fillers can select what they want.

Combo Box lets the form filler choose an item from a pop-up menu or type in a value.

List Box displays a list of options the form filler can select.

Text Field lets the form filler type in text, such as name, address, phone number, etc.

Signature Field creates a blank digital signature field for reviewers to sign the document.

Chapter 8 in your user manual devotes the bulk of its contents to explaining how to create interactive forms. And you can get pretty fancy, down to using the built-in JavaScript tools to handle number strings, email the completed form to you, even insert the current date or hide certain text fields until the form is printed.

What’s more, interactive forms mean you can capture data more easily. With PhantomPDF Business and JavaScript, you can pull data from your interactive forms into your database. That means less manual data entry, which reduces time, cost and errors.

Come to think of it, with all the timesaving possibilities this offers you, maybe we can help you get closer to that tropical vacation after all.

8 Comments

Daniel

Foxit

If you create the form initially with PhantomPDF, it should be able to be opened, filled out, and saved with any PDF reader, including Adobe Reader. If the form was initially created with Adobe Acrobat, it would have been created with Reader Extension permissions embedded. This means if you edit the form in any editor other that Adobe Acrobat, it will not work with Adobe Reader (but will with other PDF readers).

Ali K. Thabit

Mrs. Kathleen Danby

I bought Foxit Phantom from Grey Matter, and I am absolutely delighted with it. I have used it many times to make .pdf files from my scans, and I can even tidy them up if the scan is a bit untidy. Great product, and I would recommend anyone to use it.